In a collaborative document editing system, a user can often upload an electronic document to a remote server, and keep a local copy of the electronic document on the local drive of the user device. A large number of such electronic documents can be word documents and PDFs. Comments on these files today can only be made within the native editor such as a dedicated editing application that can open and modify a word or a PDF document. In order to make a comment within the document, such as adding a comment section in a word or PDF document, the user usually needs to download the most up-to-date copy of the document from the remote server to the local drive, and then open the downloaded copy via a locally installed application such as a word processor to insert a comment. After inserting the comment, the user usually uploads the updated document including the newly added comment back to the remote server such that the server and the local user device are synchronized with edited content. Thus at least two rounds of manual operations including downloading and uploading are performed by a user in order to add a comment in a document in the cloud.
When receiving a document from a user device, the remote server usually converts the document from its native format to a format compatible with the remote storage system. When a user needs to download or export the document to their local drive to make a comment, the remote server may then again convert the document back to its native format for the comment to be made. Thus at least two rounds of format conversion are usually involved at the remote server.